@deanpotter walking the walk high above Yosemite Valley.
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See @deanpotter and the best of the best in @reelrock’s epic film about the climbers and renegade climbing culture of Yosemite Valley in “Valley Uprising.” Now available for digital download on Vimeo on Demand. Enjoy!

Mountain Jews (also known as Kavkazi Jews), from the area that is now Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and Chechnya in the Caucasus Mountains, have been an established community since at least the 5th century C.E. Mountains Jews have an oral tradition that they descend directly from the Ten Lost Tribes who were forced into exile by the Assyrian Empire following their conquest of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E. From the early 17th century until the 18th century, a valley located near Derbent, Dagestan was the site of a large community of Mountain Jews and was known as ‘the Jewish Valley’. For many years this valley prospered until an uprising of nearby Lakia caused many Jewish people to be slaughtered through antisemitic pogroms and their community dispersed.

It was through this dispersal that some Mountain Jews settled in the Crimean Peninsula. When the Germany Army occupied Crimea in World War II, several hundred Mountain Jews from these communities were slaughtered as part of the Holocaust. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the easing of travel restrictions for Jewish people living in the former U.S.S.R., many Mountain Jews made aliyah to Israel. A smaller number moved to the United States and parts of the European Union. Today, Israel’s Mountain Jew community is up to 140,000 strong.